When an employer decides to hire a new employee, a hiring manager determines requirements for the new employee. The requirements include mandatory characteristics for the new employee. With the requirements in mind, the hiring manager begins to review resumes that the employer receives from potential candidates.
A resume, or curriculum vitae, summarizes a candidate's career and qualifications. The resume is a mechanism to convey personal and business-related characteristics that the candidate believes to be relevant to a prospective employer. The resume typically includes the candidate's career objective, personal interests, professional affiliations, educational background, employment history, and a description of work experience.
Reviewing candidate resumes is typically a manual process that involves the hiring manager reading or scanning each paper or electronic resume in a stack of resumes with the requirements for the new employee in mind. After reading or scanning a resume, the hiring manager decides whether the candidate's qualifications described in the resume can possibly satisfy the job requirements. For each resume that seems to satisfy the requirements, the hiring manager contacts the potential candidate and attempts to schedule an interview. Once the potential candidate accepts the invitation to interview, the potential candidate becomes a candidate for the new position. One disadvantage of this process is the time required by the hiring manager to review resumes that do not possibly qualify for the position. The hiring manager is reviewing a large number of resumes for the purpose of narrowing them down to a few resumes that describe candidates who might qualify for the position and warrant an interview or hire. Furthermore, the accuracy of the process depends on the accuracy of the hiring manager who is reading or scanning the large number of resumes. Thus, the manual process does not lend itself to reviewing a large enough number of resumes and is likely to miss the resume of a qualified potential candidate or find the resume of an unqualified potential candidate.
Prior electronic systems improved upon the manual process by creating a database of resumes and tools to search the database. The impetus for developing these systems was to reduce the time required to review resumes, eliminate the tediousness of the task, and improve the accuracy of the search. These prior systems typically scanned a database of documents using a textual word search of the resume content. The textual word search did not account for alternative terminology, spelling, format, or case differences between the search terms and the resume content. The textual word search also did not take into account the length of the duration of an experience. Since these prior systems rely upon key words to describe the resume content, the disadvantages of these prior systems are similar to those of the manual process. These prior systems retrieve a much larger number of resumes than the number of possibly qualified resumes. Thus, these systems retrieve a large number of irrelevant resumes. To narrow the output to a short list, these systems require a further manual review tallying the maximum possible duration of experience for each required skill or experience-related phrase. This manual review is still timely and prone to error. Borrowing a term from the science and art of data mining, the precision ratio of prior systems has been extremely low. For certain technical jobs and jobs that require more than minimal experience, the precision ratio can be under 5% and at times even below 1%.
Other prior electronic systems attempted to solve the reduction of the large number of resumes to a short list of possibly qualified candidates by ignoring the resume and relying upon the candidate to input the duration of experience that they have in a skill or experience-related phrase. A search performed by these systems include the duration of experience on only a predetermined set of skill or experience-related phrases and rely on the candidate or the candidate's representative to correctly enter the duration of experience for the skill or experience-related phrase. These systems may consider alternate terminology, spelling, or formatting differences, but only for the predetermined set of skill or experience-related phrases. There are three principal disadvantages to these systems.
First, prior electronic systems provide a very time consuming set-up for candidates or their representatives. The candidate must enter each acquired skill or experience-related phrase and the associated duration of experience. This becomes a particularly daunting task when considering the number of recruitment systems to which an applicant might want to post a resume or list of qualifications. It is also a daunting task for the recruitment systems managers because their staff must read each resume or interview each candidate to obtain as many skill or experience-related phrases as possible from their previous experiences.
Second, prior electronic systems are not dynamic. They cannot consider a skill or experience-related phrase and its possible duration of experience as soon as the resume arrives into the system. In these systems, a new skill or experience-related phrase will never be searchable for a given duration of experience unless the users of the system grant the skill or experience-related phrase the status of being searchable by duration of experience, irrespective of the existence of the resume in the system.
Third, prior electronic systems tally the duration of experience for a skill or experience-related phrase at search time by utilizing traditional search techniques. Performing the tallying of years of experience at search time optimizes storage and data normalization and provides a simple traditional construct to the SELECT statement of a relational database. Unfortunately, tallying the duration at search time is a processor intensive operation that negatively impacts the system performance.
Thus, there is a need for a resume management and recruitment workflow system that includes search and recruitment workflow tools to reduce a resume database to a manageable number of resumes by identifying a set of candidates who can possibly satisfy the qualifications and requirements sought by a hiring manager. The search should identify any resume that includes the sought after qualification or requirement and should also interpret synonymous or alternative terms to be equivalent to the sought after qualification or requirement. Furthermore, the search should identify most resumes that can possibly include the sought after qualification or requirement and should avoid identifying resumes that cannot possibly include the sought after qualification or requirement. The qualifications and requirements should include any skill or experience-related phrase that appears in a resume, but should also accommodate requiring a candidate to possess the qualification or requirement for a specified minimum period of time. The present invention addresses this need.